Jean Cutts is very pleased with the way her 99-year-old mother, Bessie McDiarmid, is looked after at a Surrey care home. "The staff are very professional and they give their all," she says.

But Cutts, a retired headteacher, reckons she has paid more than £20,000 to the home over the past five years to top up the maximum the county council has been prepared to offer for care fees. In addition, she calculates she pays more than £1,500 a year for "extras' such as dry cleaning, toiletries, hairdressing and eye and foot care.

"Given that's coming out of my pension, it's quite difficult," says Cutts, 72, from Walton-on-Thames, who is herself recovering from a spell in hospital.

She recalls that she was "quite shocked" when she first received the request for a top-up payment from her mother's care home, which is run by a charity. "I didn't know anything," she says. "I was quite naive about everything when she was given this place.

"I find you have to be a little bit assertive and aggressive. A lot of people give up, or may not be articulate enough or – if you'll forgive me – bright enough to deal with it all. They don't know what to do."

Even now, she admits she doesn't fully understand the system. She has been told recently that her mother is probably entitled to some extra funding, and may have been for two years, but she remains unclear exactly what such funding might be and why it might now be available.

Her mother, who was widowed in 1992, has dementia and is very frail. "Being somewhat cynical," Cutts says, "as my mother is now 99.5 years of age, this extra contribution will possibly only have to be paid short-term."